The connection to the server failed (iPhone)

Anyone else running into the "Cannot Get Mail - The connection to the server failed." error on an iPhone? Pushed Gmail has been working very well for me since this morning, but in the past two hours or so, I have been receiving the error message I stated every time my phone checks for mail (whether pushed or manual sync). I have tried to disable and re-enable mail syncing under Mail, Contacts, Calendars. I also blew away my NS account completely on my iPhone, hard-reset, then setup my NS account again, and finally hard-reset again to see if I could get it working. No go. Is NS just having server issues right now or is there something more to it?

having the same problem. Found that on the Nuevasync settings that I was getting a verification failure. It turned out my outlook at my office was causing too many multiple connections to google.
Try turning off all other email apps, then go back to the iphone and delete and resync account after you get the green light back on the nuevasync website

...I take it back....I'm again having the same issue. I have a red light on the nuevasync website, and it claims too many connections (from google) but the only device making any connections is my iphone.

Muzzman, sorry that you are having the same issue, but I am glad it's not just an isolated problem on my end of things. I only have my iPhone connecting to my Gmail account right now, as you do. I normally have Mail open on my MacBook Pro while I am at home in the evenings, but again, just my iPhone is connected right now.

Okay, so as I am writing this, I just got a flood of e-mail on my iPhone. Apparently it just began working again. I wonder if it is back up for good or if there are still issues NS is working on.

Hi, I hadn't read the forum for a few hours, and missed this.
So, we've been investigating this issue (at least, I'm assuming you all have the same problem).
It's taken a while to get to the bottom of it because initially all we knew were that some users had 'too many connection' errors.
We didn't know if this was due to desktop IMAP clients (e.g. they have 9 connections and we become the 10th) OR were we creating too many connections.
The number of connections made by the service was something we took account of from the beginning of design work (having worked in the email server space for a long time, we understood the importance of not burning connections). Therefore the service was designed to use one IMAP connection, plus N extra where N is the number of push monitored folders - 1.
So if you push only the inbox, we use only one IMAP connection.

It turns out, after a couple of days of investigation that there is a bug in a library we use (not our code, honest..) that can lead to extra connections being leaked.
This happens only during the folder sync phase which happens when the device is set up initially, and periodically thereafter.
How many connections are made depends on a number of factors including how many folders the user has.

We've just finished implementing a fix that I'll tentatively say will resolve the problem. This new code should go live in the next hour.

Unfortunately the situation wasn't helped by the iPhone's "catch all" error : "error connecting to the server" which is used for every imaginable condition, including cases where it never even tried to connect to the server! Our test page on the web site will often report the problem, since it makes an IMAP connection to Google to test your credentials.

I really appreciate the reply! I am familiar with managing mail hosts, but on a MUCH smaller scale than what NuevaSync performs. So, I really appreciate your work and efforts in bringing push mail to the iPhone, especially (though, I do realize you service many different devices). I know it is no small, nor easy task.

I am going to attempt to re-add the NuevaSync account to my iPhone now and we'll see how it does. If there is anything specifically I can help test on an iPhone, please let me know! Thanks again!

I seem to have the same issue and it hasn't gotten any better. There are folders that do not sync (even when I try and force it to). Also, the message that are pushed...they definitely push quickly. But the body of the email hasn't push when i open it. It still has to sync to get that data.

Hi, I believe you'll see a significant improvement in the morning.

poleary2000 wrote:I seem to have the same issue and it hasn't gotten any better. There are folders that do not sync (even when I try and force it to). Also, the message that are pushed...they definitely push quickly. But the body of the email hasn't push when i open it. It still has to sync to get that data.

The decision as to whether to fetch the body on push or on-demand when the user opens it is made by the device. Some do and some don't. The iPhone fetches on demand. It's a little conflicted since in the initial folder sync it does exactly the opposite and fetches a tranche of message bodies, attachments and all. Windows Mobile phones do a nice job of fetching a plain text converted body during push, so it's on the device even if you happen to read in a railway tunnel.

MrBlippy wrote:Anyone else running into the "Cannot Get Mail - The connection to the server failed." error on an iPhone? Pushed Gmail has been working very well for me since this morning, but in the past two hours or so, I have been receiving the error message I stated every time my phone checks for mail (whether pushed or manual sync). I have tried to disable and re-enable mail syncing under Mail, Contacts, Calendars. I also blew away my NS account completely on my iPhone, hard-reset, then setup my NS account again, and finally hard-reset again to see if I could get it working. No go. Is NS just having server issues right now or is there something more to it?

Hi, we had this happen on a test device this evening. At first it caused a major panic here since it was testing against the production service. However, we were able to confirm that the phone was not even trying to connect to the service (by sniffing its network packets). We think that the sync client had got into a bad state (this happened right after a service code deployment which would have closed the device's connection). It would seem that the mail app only has but one error message, and so no matter what's wrong it tells you that it can't connect to the server, even when that's just not the case.
Thankfully, a reboot of the device got it back to normal.

I too get that one. I will try a reboot of the device.

Everything has been running very smoothly this morning. Whatever changes NuevaSync made last night/overnight fixed my slow e-mail loading times as well as the issue I was having where only 85/110 of my contacts were actually making it to my phone. Now, all my contacts are appearing on my phone and contact changes via Gmail are actually being pushed out to my phone.

Thanks for all your hard work, so far, NuevaSync team!

I'm getting the server failure, too. It worked fine up until 1500BST, but has now stopped working. Rebooted my iPhone, and also deleted/recreated the account on my iPhone, but still getting the 'connection to server failed' message.

I have the same as Joshua.

I'm going to eat a slice of humble pie because we had this problem show up again this morning on a test device, and took more packet traces, and this is a problem in our service infrastructure. The excuse for not understanding this earlier is that it happens before the device's request ever hits our sync code, so we see nothing arriving. It's being bounced by the middleware for some reason that we expect to understand and fix very soon.